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Gov. Scott visits Jacksonville to keep in-state tuition for undocumented students in spotlight

Florida Gov. Rick Scott was in Jacksonville to host a College Affordability Roundtable with high school students. Scott greets participants including Darice Greene, mother of Sabon Greene (right) a senior at Englewood High School as the meeting begins.

To keep his support for a hotly debated tuition bill firmly in the spotlight, Gov. Rick Scott visited Jacksonville to hear from students who struggle to afford a college education.

The bill, Senate Bill 1400, would eliminate universities’ ability to automatically raise tuition by 15 percent each year, and it would allow undocumented immigrants who met certain criteria to pay in-state tuition at public universities.

The bill is currently stalled in the Senate with two weeks left in the Florida legislative session, Scott said.

The governor spoke with about a dozen high school students and parents Monday morning who said paying for college is a struggle.

The group of mostly first-generation college hopefuls pointed to their parents’ income, lack of scholarships and increasing college costs. To compensate, they forgo dream schools for cheaper ones and take on loans.

“There’s just this gap of thousands of dollars that no one can really pay for,” said Tiffany Walter, a Sandalwood High senior sorting out her financial aid options to attend Florida Atlantic University.

Rolando Cordova, a Wolfson High senior, said he’d be able to attend his dream school — the University of Florida — to pursue a medical career if this bill passes. As it stands, Cordova is an undocumented immigrant, and most colleges require him to pay out-of-state tuition.

That’s impossible for this son of a housekeeper and a driller, so he’ll attend Florida International University, which allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition.

The portion of the bill that allows undocumented students to pay in-state tuition has drawn the loudest opposition. To qualify, students would have to attend a Florida high school for three consecutive years before graduating, enroll in a college within two years of graduation, produce a transcript and show he or she is pursuing citizenship, according to the bill.

One of the primary opponents of the bill, Senate President Don Gaetz, said allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition in this way — through tuition cost waivers — would shift the cost of tuition onto Florida taxpayers.

“The question is the extent to which parents, struggling to save for their own children’s education, and taxpayers, slowly recovering from a deep recession, should be mandated to pay for substantially increased tuition subsidies for non-citizens, who have not attained legal status in our country,” he said in an e-mail statement to his constituents.

He also said it “casts a blanket of approval over non-citizens who are in this country without proper legal status from anywhere in the world, including countries which are caldrons of terrorism and anti-American violence.”

Scott said the bill would allow those students to pursue an affordable education, and it would allow students at all public universities to know what the price of college is starting out, rather than having to cope with constant tuition increases.

Overall costs are rising each year, in part due to tuition increasing 15 percent each year at the state’s public universities. Florida lawmakers passed rules in 2007 and 2009 allowing universities to raise tuition each year to catch up with the national tuition average, which Florida still falls well behind.

To pay for college, students look for scholarships.

Florida’ primary scholarship, the merit-based Bright Futures, covers part of tuition but the award amount has decreased significantly since 2009.

When scholarships fall short, they take on loans. The average student loan debt for graduates of Florida public colleges and universities was $20,500 for the 2011-2012 year, according to Institute for College Access & Success, an education research group.

Opponents to eliminating the 15 percent tuition increase say the increases are necessary to make up for reductions in state funding to universities since the recession.

If the 15 percent tuition increases are eliminated, Scott said, he’d work with universities to find other ways to fund their needs.

One way, he said, is performance pay to universities that show they’re graduating more students, producing more research and producing more patents.

Part of the bill allows universities to increase tuition up to six percent each year if they reach those benchmarks.